State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms take many millions of
interactions to attain human-level performance. Humans, on the other hand, can
very quickly exploit highly rewarding nuances of an environment upon first
discovery. In the brain, such rapid learning is thought to depend on the
hippocampus and its capacity for episodic memory. Here we investigate whether a
simple model of hippocampal episodic control can learn to solve difficult
sequential decision-making tasks. We demonstrate that it not only attains a
highly rewarding strategy significantly faster than state-of-the-art deep
reinforcement learning algorithms, but also achieves a higher overall reward on
some of the more challenging domains.